The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy
Author: Emma Josephine Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2010-08-12
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0521519373

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Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.

Renaissance Revivals

Renaissance Revivals
Author: Wendy Griswold
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1986-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226309231

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Renaissance Revivals examines patterns in the London revivals of two English Renaissance theatre genres over the past four centuries. Griswold's focus on revenge tragedies and city comedies illuminates the ongoing interaction between society and its cultural products. No cultural object is ever created anew, she argues, but is instead constructed from existing cultural genres and conventions, the visions and professional needs of the artist, and the interests of an audience. Thus, every "new play" is in part a renaissance and every "revival" is in part an entirely new cultural object.

Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England

Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England
Author: Thomas Rist
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351903373

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Considering major works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster among others, this book transforms current understanding of early modern revenge tragedy. Examing the genre in light of historical revisions to England's Reformations, and with appropriate regard to the social history of the dead, it shows revenge tragedy is not an anti-Catholic and Reformist genre, but one rooted in, and in dialogue with, traditional Catholic culture. Arguing its tragedies are bound to the age's funerary performances, it provides a new view of the contemporary theatre and especially its role in the religious upheavals of the period.

Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance

Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance
Author: Janet Clare
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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In this study of revenge tragedies - notably by Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Marston and John Webster - Janet Clare suggests that genres are not passively inherited, but made and re-made every time a new play is performed. The implication that there is an identifiable genre of revenge tragedy rehearsing common conventions is challenged as Clare examines Renaissance plays of revenge on their own terms. While disclosing evident inter-textual links and a similar appeal to classical material, revenge plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period strive for a range of effects including satire, parody and farce. Some plays embody a providential outlook while others seem defiantly secular. Francis Bacon's famous maxim 'a kind of wild justice' captures the moral ambivalence of revenge: a rough justice on the point of anarchy. Janet Clare demonstrates the problematic nature of revenge as it defines dramatic action As the exploration of plays in this study reveals, revenge is no

A Companion to Renaissance Drama

A Companion to Renaissance Drama
Author: Arthur F. Kinney
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 644
Release: 2002-06-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780631219507

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This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.

Origins of English Revenge Tragedy

Origins of English Revenge Tragedy
Author: Oppitz-Trotman George Oppitz-Trotman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: English drama
ISBN: 1474441742

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Investigates the figures and materials of English tragedyKey FeaturesEstablishes a new approach to the relationship between historical performance and printed literatureComplicates the popular concept of metatheatreOffers boldly original readings of important English tragedies like Hamlet and The Spanish TragedyShows how our encounter with difficulty in the reading of revenge plays can be equivalent to an imaginative confrontation with the contradictions of early modern theatrical actionCharting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book explores how recognition of the dramatic person is involved in theatrical materiality. It shows how the moral difficulty of revenge in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi is inseparable from the difficulty of discerning human shapes in the theatre and on the page. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, Oppitz-Trotman argues that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in it.

English Revenge Drama

English Revenge Drama
Author: Linda Woodbridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-09-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139493558

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Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness - legal, economic, political and social. Revengers' precise equivalents - the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads - are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of 'paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.

The motif of romantic love in Renaissance Revenge Tragedies

The motif of romantic love in Renaissance Revenge Tragedies
Author: Natalia Gubergritz
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2018-02-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3668640440

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Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, language: English, abstract: The concerns of civilized human society from the beginning on until our days have not changed much. The basic problems of mankind and therefore the basic topics literature was written about are religion, love, family and war. English Renaissance drama is no exception to that. One of the most fascinating genres of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is the Revenge Tragedy. It combines revenge plots with love matters and confronts all this with the structure and beliefs of society. One of the motifs the Revenge Tragedy depends on in order to remain absorbing for the audience is the motif of romantic love. Hence this will be the topic of the paper at hand. Further on I will discuss the different aspects of romantic love and analyse their status in Renaissance society and also the representations of this aspects in three of the most important Revenge Tragedies of that time. At first I will look on how love was seen in Renaissance society, and in which way matters of marriage were settled. This topic will be regarded deeper in the second chapter, where the approach to love and marriage will be exemplified on the tragedies. The problem of marriage, particularly unequal and secret marriage will be analysed in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Afterwards I am going to compare the play to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and see how Kyd handled the Problem of unequal relationships. In chapter 3.3 one of the most important plays in literary history will be analysed on the love relationships of its main characters. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the romance between the Prince of Denmark and the fair Ophelia is of highest interest to the literary critic. Well, naturally the motif of romantic love does not only include marriage and interpersonal relationships, but also the question of sexuality is quite important. In this paper, I will discuss the dealing with all these topics in the Renaissance tragedies by working closely with the plays in question. As will be found out in the course of the discussion, romantic love, with its different aspects is a crucial motif to every successful Revenge Tragedy.

When the Bad Bleeds

When the Bad Bleeds
Author: Imke Pannen
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2010
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 389971640X

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Mantic elements are manifold in the English drama of the Renaissance period: they are supernatural manifestations and have a prophetic, future-determining function within the dramatic plot, which can be difficult to discern. Addressing contemporaries of Shakespeare, this study interprets a representative number of revenge tragedies, among them The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Revenger's Tragedy, to draw general conclusions about the use of mantic elements in this genre. The analysis of the cultural context and the functionalisation of mantic elements in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline era show their essential function in the construction of the plot. Mantic elements create and stimulate audience expectations. They are not only rhetoric decorum, but structural elements, and convey knowledge about the genre, the fate of which is determined by retaliation. An interpretation of revenge tragedy is only possible if mantic providentialism is taken into account.